Exemplary embodiments herein relate to a vehicle seat for a motor vehicle. Many sedans, coupes, CUVs and SUVs have folding seats with high-latch strikers where the striker is located high on the seat back and the striker engages with a latch on the vehicle body. When the striker is located high on the seat back of the vehicle seat and the latch is on the vehicle body, a horizontally-oriented striker can catch a seat belt and drag webbing of the seat belt toward the latch where the webbing could be damaged. This problem often occurs where the available width of the vehicle prevents a seat belt D-ring from being located far enough outboard with respect to the vehicle seat to route the webbing outward of the area where the striker engages the latch.
Vehicle seats employing these horizontal strikers in vehicles not having the adequate aforementioned width can require the operator to pull the seat belt webbing out of the way of the latch area to prevent damage to the seat belt webbing. Some other redirection device or operation to pull the seat belt webbing out of the way, such as an elastic band or presenter arm, could also alleviate this problem. This other redirection device, however, adds cost to the vehicle.
A pivoting striker that pivots outwardly from an outboard lateral edge of a vehicle seat to a horizontal orientation is also known. Such a pivoting striker, however, requires a complicated linkage mechanism to move the striker from a retracted vertical position to the horizontally extended position. Moreover, such a pivoting striker mechanism may not alleviate the problem of the horizontally oriented striker catching the seat belt webbing and dragging the seat belt webbing toward the latch if the striker mechanism pivots outwardly before passing by the seat belt.